Climate Change Is Dead

One of the strange mercies of the last week of the year is how the machinery pauses just long enough to hear your own breathing again. And yet, when you get all that breathing room, the thoughts you’ve been pushing away suddenly show up, like they’ve been waiting patiently for this exact moment when they have nowhere left to hide.

So naturally, I’ve been thinking about the year that’s ending and the one ahead.

I’ve spent most of my adult life inside a conversation I never trained for, but never really left either. It’s certainly not the only thing I’ve done since finishing high school, but it has been the invisible thread running through my life. In boardrooms and kitchens, in Patagonia and elsewhere, in essays and private conversations, I’ve been someone who talks about climate change, and that has shaped the kind of adult I kept trying to become.

And then, toward the end of this year, I realized I had to stop.

The planet, unfortunately, didn’t stop warming. The crisis, unfortunately, didn’t go away. No. What happened was that the words suddenly started feeling like they were not pointing in the right direction.